Jason McClain

Episode 7: Levels Of Learning

In this episode of Evolutionary Sales, in service of your full integration of the material, Jason not only gives a comprehensive review of the material covered so far, but also teaches you about the four levels of learning.
In Addition, he teaches you the the four aspects to modeling subjective experience and in doing so explains the purpose and benefit of distinguishing a flowchart for your business process allowing you to adjust and develop in precisely the area that will assist you in exploding your sales results.

Episode 7: Levels Of Learning

“As a salesperson, you’re in business for yourself. That is, make a decision that you are in charge of your destiny, your income, and your level of satisfaction and fulfillment. I don’t care who signs your paychecks, or your commission checks. You’re in business for yourself. Some people have this internal conflict about money. They think it’s not spiritual to make money, or they think to make money you have sell your soul. And I say, “You bet! Sell your soul."

Jason McClain: Last week on “Evolutionary Sales” we talked about this idea of permission-based selling, as well as gave you some tools and tricks to use on the phone, whether it’s a cold call or a warm call, to make sure you can get to the person who is not only empowered, but also qualified to actually make a decision as to whether or not they should be talking to you. Again, we’ve been together for a while now, so I’d like to review the series, and I’d like to review a few mindsets and reinforce a few mindsets. And part of this repetition is to make sure that you learn it, not just know it. Again, I’m partnering with you in your success, and what that means to you is I’m going to use everything I know about teaching people how to learn, learning how to learn, such that you can deepen these distinctions, and actually embody them, and you won’t even have to think about them.

There are four levels of learning, and the first level is unconscious incompetence. In other words, you don’t even know that you don’t know it; you don’t even know that you’re not competent. For instance, if you don’t know a certain distinction about how to use the phone, or you don’t know a certain distinction about how to manage your own mind, you’re incompetent, but you’re not even aware of it. That’s the first level of learning.

And then once you get exposed to an idea, the second level of learning is conscious incompetence. In other words you start to become painfully aware of the fact that you really don’t know how to do that thing, whether it’s snowboarding, or whether it’s golf, or whether it’s a particular communication skill or distinction. It’s all the same; you become painfully aware. You literally are falling down on the slopes of communication, if you will.

And then the next level is conscious competence. You’re competent, but you still need to think about it. Maybe you need to refer to some notes. Maybe you need to keep a flow chart on the wall so you know which stage of the process you’re at. This is the stage at which it’s easiest to teach it to other people.

And the last stage is ‘unconscious competence’. You’re so good at it you don’t need to think anymore. You can just do it.

Those four stages are the stages I want to help you move through, so that you can ‘not even have to think about it’ when you’re out with a prospect, or you’re with a client. You can just be of service to them. You can just manage your mind. In fact, you don’t even have to go through the, let’s call them ‘rituals’, of the circle of excellence, or of a switch pattern, or of timeline therapy, because it’s happening automatically. You’ve built those habit patterns of the mind, so that’s the purpose, intention, and literally the destination of all these things that I’m doing with you in this series of podcasts. So I’m going to review the podcasts, but I’m going to do so with a specific type of language pattern. I’m going to speak to it as if you’re already doing it. This should already make sense to you. Part of your experience is the linguistic aspect of your experience. And so I’m going to be languaging these things such that you’re already thinking that you’re doing it, unconsciously.

First of all, in the Prologue we talked about subscribing to this series of podcasts. Some of you may be thinking this is getting a little bit old by now. Make sure you tell your friends about this podcast, and tell them to subscribe as well through iTunes or through their RSS reader. More importantly, the whole purpose of this podcast is there’s a shift in the marketplace that’s occurring from the 20th-century marketplace to the 21st-century marketplace. And it really is an integration of Eastern and Western thinking, that is, the free market with service, contribution, and purpose. And we’re going to get into purpose at the end of the series, or at least the first round of the series. But I want you to put your mind around what it is you uniquely have to contribute to people. What is it that you’re doing that has a deeper purpose? A deeper purpose. Maybe you’re selling cell phones, but what you’re really providing is access to the outside world, or safety and security to family members who might be in an emergency. Whatever it is for you is fine.

You also made several commitments, commitments to mindsets in the first episode. Those mindsets were, first of all, as a salesperson, you’re in business for yourself. That is, make a decision that you are in charge of your destiny, your income, and your level of satisfaction and fulfillment. I don’t care who signs your paychecks, or your commission checks. You’re in business for yourself. You made that decision.

The second decision you made was that sales is a profession to be proud of, and that you’re going to practice ‘evolutionary sales’, sales for the 21st century, and I’d like to take a moment to redistinguish or redefine evolutionary sales. Evolutionary sales is inspiring someone towards a vision, their vision, and then leverage them past their limitations. Now we all have things that limit us, thoughts, feelings, past experiences; they’re different in different contexts. But it’s your duty, if you’re coming from service and contribution, to assist that person in getting what they truly want. It doesn’t matter what context it is in business. It could be a sales training. It could be selling them telephone service. It could be selling them a car. Providing that you are not creating additional stress in their life. There are some people who are simply not financially qualified and you ought to be careful where that line is. But ultimately it’s your duty, if you’re coming from service and contribution, to leverage someone beyond their limitations.

The third decision you made is that money is a measure of the value you are producing in the world, or providing to others. Some people have this internal conflict about money. They think it’s not spiritual to make money, or they think to make money you have to sell your soul. And I say, “You bet! Sell your soul.” But I mean something very different than most people mean when they say that. When I say, “Sell your soul,” I really mean, “market your deepest purpose.”

The fourth commitment you made is to have the mindset that there’s always a way. There’s always a way. It’s not, “can you do it or not?” It’s ‘how’.

And in the final commitment that you made in the initial episode is that there’s no power in blame. The true power is in taking responsibility for all of your results.

With those mindsets, or what I would call ‘organizing principles’ then we talked about beliefs, and beliefs aren’t simply something that you do once in one exercise and then it’s just something you don’t need to worry about again. We all have beliefs that come up; they come up in our language. I can’t tell you how important it is to develop your awareness, awareness of your thought patterns, awareness of your thinking, or as some people say, it’s ‘meta-cognition’, that is ‘thinking about your thinking’. In the simplest way, and this applies to all concepts of your lives, how many times have you ever had a lack of information, interpreted the events in some way, and literally made something up about somebody or about some event? “No, they didn’t call me because they’re not interested in my service.” “Oh, you know, he or she didn’t call me because they don’t really care about me or want to connect with me again.” Or, “Gosh, that person hasn’t returned my call because some other service provider got in there and stole the contract out from underneath me.” When really, you don’t know any of that. Just imagine how many times some event occurs, or a lack of event occurs, and you literally make something up out of whole cloth. And then you have an emotional experience that’s disempowering, or maybe you have an emotional experience that’s empowering but it’s a total fantasy. And so I like to say that you need to stay in the not knowing around your interpretations. That’s part of managing your mind, part of managing your thought patterns. And also, what you make could mean about yourself, about the world, about your business. Are you forming beliefs, new beliefs that need to be deconstructed, and as you know, as you found out in the second episode, beliefs will form the limitations, or open the doors to possibility in terms of what’s available to you as you move through the world.

We talked about Roger Bannister, and using that powerful example of how he broke the 4-minute mile. We talked about self-talk, or internal dialogue, which is sort of a subset of those interpretations. It’s also different entirely in that maybe you’re saying something disempowering about yourself, and you’re literally engaged in self-hypnosis but you don’t even know it, “Oh, I’ll never be successful at this.” Or, “I’m not sure about this business,” or whatever.

We talked about fear and anxiety, how to resolve those, and we talked about the mind-emotion connection. We talked about how your internal experience is structured in visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, gustatory, and language, or pictures, sounds, feeling, smells, tastes and linguistics.

In the next episode, Episode Two, or the third podcast, we talked about all the ways in which you can get the most, really get the most, out of the series. And I suggested to you to relisten to the Prologue. We also talked about some mind mastery exercises. We showed you how your internal experience literally is coded through V.A.K.O.G.L. by moving faces around, and then we did a ‘circle of excellence’. And we did an exercise with internal self-talk, to dissolve the power that had over you.

And in Episode Three, or the fourth podcast, we talked about creating your future. We used your unconscious organization of time to assist you in dissolving your past and in setting your future. And in doing so we talked about your reticular activator system, and we demystified the secret to ‘The Secret’, that is the ‘law of attraction’. Then we talked about how to set S.M.A.R.T. goals: Stating the positive, Measurable, Achievable, Responsible, and set in Time, S-M-A-R-T, SMART goals.

In Episode Four, we talked about identity and prospecting, how to create an identity, literally ‘create a name for yourself’ that’s memorable and accurate, and distinguish yourself from the market, and how to use language to impact your prospect or client. We talked about how to find your prospects, to get really specific, both in terms of who they are, where they are, what they do, what habits they have, even what magazines they subscribe to or what hobbies they engage in, so you can then go and find those people.

In Episode Five you began to use the tools of rapport, unconscious communication, to really connect and engage with people through matching them, pacing them, which is ‘matching through time’, and then leading them to some new place. You learned, and you began to incorporate the fact that you can match their body, their voice tone, their language, their accent, all of these things. And you learned that as you’re coming from contribution and service, again it’s your duty to use all the tools available to you within ethical grounding that will serve the client’s or prospect’s outcomes.

In Episode Six we talked about using the phone, and we gave you some tips and tricks to assist you in easily getting past those people that often stand in the way of you reaching the actual decision maker. So you’ve set your mindset; you’ve done the personal work, both emotionally and in terms of managing your own mind and your beliefs. And you’re learning to engage and reach those people after you’ve found them, couched with the identity of who you are as a sales professional.

So now let’s get into a few more ideas about the phone, about rapport, and about flow charts, because one of the most critical things for you to begin doing is begin tracking every aspect of your efficacy. And what that means to you is you should have a flow chart for your business, so that you can track how many phone calls it takes you to make that contact, and how many contacts it takes for you to set an appointment with somebody, and how many appointments you need to set to be able to do a final presentation, and how many final presentations you need to do, statistically, to be able to open a relationship and acquire that contract so you can begin providing service to your prospect or client.

As an example for you, I’m going to provide the “Evolutionary Sales” flowchart to you. So, just go to the blog. You can go to www.PersonalLifeMedia.com, and click on blogs in the top navigation bar, and you should see my photo first on the right-hand column. It’s pretty clear, “Jason McClain, ‘Evolutionary Awareness’” is the name of the blog. Just click on that and I’m going to put in the blog that resource for you. If you don’t see it on the first page, just do a search for “Evolutionary Sales Process” or do a search for “flowchart” and you should be able to find it. You can download that so you can see an example of it.

And to do one of these flowcharts you need to think about experience in a different way. There are four levels of experience. And one of them is content. These are the actual words that you’re saying. These are things like scripts, and people often get lost in the content. I recommend that people forget about scripts at first. But think about what your outcome is, what you’re trying to accomplish. And there are three other levels of experience. There’s process, there’s structure, and there’s context. So again, all four of them are process, structure, context, and content. The benefit of thinking at the level of structure and process is that you can begin to distinguish things out at a meta level, or at the structure level, or at the process level, such that you can see different components, or different stages in the overall process. In doing so, you get to develop a flowchart for your business.

The problem with scripts and things of that nature is that people often get lost in the words but they don’t understand the purpose of the words. But if you take any script, any good script will have a greeting; that’s the first stage in the process, or the first box in the structure. And in the second one will be some sort of interest gathering, or permission acquisition, “Do you have a few minutes?” “Is now a good time?” Easy ways to engage in permission-based selling, as we talked in the last episode. The problem of scripts is that people really do get lost in them. One of the things that I like to do when a telemarketer calls me is I like to ask them oddball questions, and notice if they get thrown off of their scripts they don’t know what to do. They have to find their way back in some dense paragraph of some content that they didn’t write themselves. The benefit of not relying on a script is that no matter where you’re at, no matter what tangent you go off on, in your rapport with the prospect or client you can easily get back to where you’re supposed to go. This is a very different way of thinking.

In addition, you can track every stage. So in other words, if you’re doing a hundred phone calls a day, but you’re only reaching two people, well maybe you’re calling at the wrong time of day. Or maybe you need to work on your skills at getting to the decision maker. There’s any number of explanations. But you can begin to track and to see if your statistics are not really measuring up, in different domains. Then you know exactly where to tap. If you’re reaching plenty of people, as you’re actually contacting the decision maker, but your statistics are really low… Let’s say only one in ten actually agrees to talk to you; well then you know you need to work on that aspect of your communication. Or maybe you need to work on how you’re presenting your offering. If you’re meeting plenty of people, and your actually scheduling plenty of meetings, and you’re actually conducting the meetings, but you’re not getting great results in terms of how many relationships you’re opening, then you probably know you need to work on your presentation skills, or your ability to frame things in such a way that they’re compelling for people. Or maybe you need to work on your information-gathering skills.

The point is you can begin to look at different components in the sales process, and then you can zero in on the places where you need to develop so you can increase your efficacy. This is the benefit of thinking about process, structure, context of course is the relationship with the client, and then the content should come last. And the content really will come naturally. You’ll begin to experiment with content, and you’ll see which language patterns are more effective, and which ones are less effective.

So again, you’ve done the personal work; you’ve learned to manage your mind; you’ve set SMART goals; you’ve prospected effectively and specifically. You’ve built an identity for yourself, made a name for yourself, something that you can live into that’s inspiring for you, accurate and distinguishes you from the marketplace. You’ve learned how to build rapport, both in person and on the phone. You’re acquiring permission for every stage of the process. And you’ve designed a flowchart for yourself so that you understand every different component of your business from cold call to referral.

Join us next week on “Evolutionary Sales”, when we’ll be discussing how to get attention once you actually reach somebody, actually acquire their attention, such that they want to listen to you right away and you’ve demonstrated respect and clarity. And we’ll get into an even deeper level of rapport, so we can start to get into value-based selling, which is really where the fun begins.

Again, I’m Jason McClain, your host and your guide to the 21st-century marketplace. For transcripts of this show, or other shows on the Personal Life Media Network, go to www.PersonalLifeMedia.com; you can reach me, your host Jason McClain at [email protected] or you can comment on the blog, ask any questions you like about any episode that you like, and I’ll be sure to engage the questions that I feel other people would find of value, both in the blog, and I may begin to answer them in the shows themselves. Thank you for your attention, and thank you for allowing me to contribute to you in your success with the 21st-century marketplace.